Scapegoating James Clapper Won't End Benghazi Scandal

Cover-Up: Intel chief James Clapper taking blame for dishonest talking points won't cauterize the Benghazi scandal. The country was still lied to about terrorists killing four Americans for the sake of Obama's re-election.

As Benghazigate became a major pre-election embarrassment for the president, a number of commentators quipped to Obama defenders who minimized its significance that, unlike in Libya on Sept. 11, "nobody died in Watergate."

Watergate is an apt comparison in some ways. The whole underlying purpose of the 1972 attempted bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters was to get President Nixon re-elected. The whole underlying purpose of lying about the killing of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith, and ex-Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, was to get President Obama re-elected.

In Watergate, the objective was to collect information that could persuade people not to vote for the Democratic nominee for president.

In Benghazigate, the objective was to suppress the truth that al-Qaida had organized a Sept. 11 attack with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades on a vulnerable diplomatic post in Libya so that the president's convention speech claim that "al-Qaida is on the path to defeat" would not be exposed as false.

In Watergate, the fiction was that, as Nixon put it, "no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident."

In Benghazigate, the fiction was, as America's United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice claimed on Fox News two months ago (and in four similar TV appearances), that "the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack, that what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction . .. as a consequence of the video" insulting Mohammad.

CBS News last week reported that it was the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by Clapper, that "cut specific references to 'al-Qaida' and 'terrorism' from the unclassified talking points given" to Rice "with the agreement of the CIA and FBI."

CBS assures us that "the White House or State Department did not make those changes." But the DNI was established in 2005 at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to centralize authority over intelligence, to "manage the national intelligence program and oversee the agencies that contribute to it."

Clapper is the president's man . For all practical purposes, he is White House staff, as much as the national security adviser. He attends Oval Office meetings and discerns the wishes of the president and senior staff.

As the DNI told CBS News, "The intelligence community assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack." And as CBS noted, "That information was shared at a classified level — which Rice, as a member of President Obama's Cabinet, would have been privy to."

The upshot: Clapper being the fall guy shortly after Obama's re-election ends Benghazigate about as much as G. Gordon Liddy going down shortly after Nixon's re-election ended Watergate.

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